Monday round-up

This morning the justices return from their holiday recess to hear two original jurisdiction cases among the states over water rights. First up is Texas v. New Mexico and Colorado. Ryke Longest previewed the case for this blog. Another preview comes from Simon Bord and Katherine Thibodeau at Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute. The second case is Florida v. Georgia; Lara Fowler had this blog’s preview, while Shelby Garland, Amanda Wong and Jared Ham preview the case for Cornell. For The Washington Post, Robert Barnes reports that “[t]he legal fight [in Florida v. Georgia] has been raging for three decades.” The George Washington Law Review’s On the Docket blog offers previews of all the cases in the January sitting.

For The Wall Street Journal, Brent Kendall and Jess Bravin report that Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute, in which the Supreme Court will consider this week whether Ohio’s voter-roll-maintenance process violates federal voter-registration laws, is “one of an array of cases in which Trump administration appointees over the past year have flipped the Justice Department’s position, moves with potential ramifications on election law, labor practices, immigration and other issues.” Additional coverage of Husted comes from Andrew Chung at Reuters, who notes that the case “explores whether some states are aggressively purging voter rolls in a way that disenfranchises thousands of voters.”

Briefly:

• At the Associated Press, Jessica Gresko reports that at Friday’s conference, the justices considered whether to review a Florida couple’s challenge to a ruling that requires them to tear down “a beachfront treehouse that would be the envy of any child.”
• At Lawfare, law student David Kimball-Stanley discusses a cert petition challenging “the federal government’s attempts to regulate the practice of 3-D printing firearms” that was also on the list for Friday’s conference, noting that “[i]f the Supreme Court chooses to hear the case, it would confront frontier issues of what kind of protection computer files that create tangible objects receive.”
• At the ImmigrationProf Blog, Kevin Johnson notes that on remand after the Supreme Court’s decision last term in Sessions v. Morales-Santana, in which the court held that differential treatment of parents by gender in immigration law violates equal protection, “the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit rejected Morales-Santana’s citizenship claim.”
• At The Federalist, Margot Cleveland takes issue with a recent New York Times editorial urging the justices to review Hidalgo v. Arizona, a cert petition challenging Arizona’s death-penalty scheme and the death penalty nationwide.
• At Education Week’s School Law Blog, Mark Walsh reports that “the latest transgender case before the justices appears unlikely to be taken up by them,” because a lawyer for the plaintiff has “told the justices that the case may soon be settled.”
• At Above the Law, David Lat offers “a new installment of Supreme Court Clerk Hiring Watch,” noting that “upon information and belief, all nine justices have finished their OT 2018 hiring.”
• In a video with accompanying commentary at The Daily Caller, Ginni Thomas interviews her husband, Justice Clarence Thomas, who, “at age 69, … is looking back on his life with gratitude and discernment with valuable lessons for others.”

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